Brown's gold sale 'cost us £500m'

GORDON Brown has cost taxpayers an estimated £500m - equivalent to the cost of 10,000 new hospital consultants - by selling off half of Britain's gold reserves, it was claimed today.

The Government has auctioned 395 tonnes of gold reserves in 17 tranches since the disposal programme was announced in May 1999, netting the Treasury $3.5bn. But the average selling price was $275 an ounce, more than $50 lower than the current $326.

TheBullionDesk.com, a precious metals news service, has calculated that at today's price, the auctions would have raised around $4.1bn, a difference of about $600m or £440m.

The figure rises to £500m because further losses have been incurred by investing the proceeds in currencies such as the euro and the yen which have depreciated over the past three years. The World Gold Council came up with a lower, but still-significant, figure of £324m.

Ross Norman at TheBullionDesk.com said: 'The Chancellor is very fond of the word 'prudent' but I am afraid that selling over half of this country's gold reserves when the price was just above a 22-year low was hardly prudent.'